24.1866, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: M=?UTF-8?Q?=C4=83da_&_S=C4=83ftoiu_?=(2012)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1866. Tue Apr 30 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.1866, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Măda & Săftoiu (2012)

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Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:42:09
From: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky [zsubrinszky at freemail.hu]
Subject: Professional Communication across Languages and Cultures

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-5171.html

EDITOR: Stanca  Măda
EDITOR: Răzvan  Săftoiu
TITLE: Professional Communication across Languages and Cultures
SERIES TITLE: Dialogue Studies 17
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky, Budapest Business School

SUMMARY

This volume approaches the topic of professional communication from a cultural
perspective, providing insights into the dynamics of creating and maintaining
relationships at work, which are deeply influenced by various linguistic
patterns. In their introduction (”Understanding the dynamics of dialogue at
work”) the editors outline the theoretical and analytical frameworks and
present an outline of the book. The eleven contributions conducted in various
professional settings are grouped together in three different parts.

Part I (“Dialogue and identity in professional settings”) is a collection of
five papers in which the sociolinguistic aspects of communication (e.g.
gender, ethnicity, professional identity, language and context) are explored.
The first paper in Part I, “Leadership and intercultural competence at work”,
by Janet Holmes, analyses the workplace discourse of leaders from different
ethnic groups (Māori and Pākehā) within one country where two well-established
cultural groups co-exist, and examines evidence of the influence of different
cultural values and interactional norms on leadership performance in
culturally contrasting workplace contexts. The leadership performance of the
mainstream, Pākehā leader provides little evidence of intercultural awareness,
while the Māori leader’s performance demonstrates intercultural competence.
The analysis suggests how new intercultural norms are forged by particular
individuals in influential positions in a multicultural society.

Next, Edda Weigand’s article, “Professional action games: Theory and
practice”, takes a holistic approach to context, language and culture in the
form of ‘professional action games’. Focusing on the example of business
games, the crucial structure (e.g. the topics of the agenda) and essential
points (e.g. stocktaking, reporting, evaluating and reasoning) of business are
elaborated based on human beings acting and reacting as cultural beings in a
complex business meeting.

In their contribution, (“Managing the director’s views: Decision-making in a
small firm context”), Jo Angouri and Evi Angelidou reveal the complexities of
the personal and professional identities and status of speakers in the process
of negotiating agreements and ratifying decisions. In the workplace,
negotiating alternatives, revisiting and making new decisions, constitute a
daily reality for most employees. The authors’ findings show that the personal
histories of employees cannot be disentangled from other facets of their
identity and that status plays a key role in the small firm decision making
context.

Liliana Coposescu’s paper (“Discursive hybridity at work”) examines
intercultural data in three types of social interactions: at selection
interviews for future professionals in social work; telephone conferences in
two multinational companies in Brașov; and Virtual Networking Communication
(VNC) sessions with a number of professionals from different parts of the
world. Her aim is to describe the way in which participants deal with
hypotheticals, narratives and small talk. The author shows how the
professional, institutional and personal experience modes shift throughout the
encounters. Narratives have been found to perform different functions: 1) in
the selection interviews they shift from hypothetical to real-life talk; 2) in
telephone conferences they report past actions; and 3) in VNC they are
embedded as small talk.

Finally, Jonathan Clifton’s “Doing trust in workplace interaction” prepares
the ground for Part II through the discussion of the various resources by
which practitioners achieve the enactment of trust: objectives and unmitigated
statements, general truths, first-hand knowledge, formulations, consensus and
detailed accounts. Using transcripts, naturally-occurring talk and
conversation analysis, this paper provides a first-order account that makes
visible the machinery of talk by which trust is achieved. Findings indicate
that trust can be achieved through displays of epistemic primacy, which are
oriented as displays of trustworthiness, and thus can lead to the doing of
trust as an in situ members’ achievement.

Part II (“Functions and strategies in professional communication”) is devoted
to the range of acceptable communication strategies in workplace situations,
such as indirectness and politeness, requests and evaluation, and humour and
moderation techniques. Michaela Gheorghe and Adina Velea’s paper on “Control
acts in Romanian” opens the second part of the volume with a descriptive
approach to directives and requests in Romanian. The authors’ aim is to
identify the grammar and language specific features that allow speakers to use
certain mitigating devices. The first section shows that the form of control
acts in Romanian is dependent on some typological features, mainly those
related to the lexicalisation of internal and external arguments of the main
verb or to the sensitivity towards the prominence of the speaker or the
hearer. The second part of the paper is a case study on control acts
(Ervin-Tripp, Guo & Lampert 1990: 308) in Romanian written workplace
discourse. The results of the study draw both on qualitative (i.e. description
of control acts patterns) and quantitative (i.e. frequency of linguistic
forms) analyses. The most frequently used form of expressing both requests and
directives is considered to be the imperative mood. Regarding the scale of
directness, it can be noticed that the mood derivable (i.e. the bare
infinitive) is the most direct form of expressing requests. The next
categories on the scale of directness are represented by explicit
performatives (please and the future tense), by scope stating (need to and
could), and finally, by preparatory conditions (Can you..? Could you..?). With
regard to directives, a small amount of them were found in the data. In four
out of six of the writer’s directives, ‘have to’ is used in order to underline
an employee’s obligation. There was one example found for the non-finite
verbal form expressed by the passive voice as a directive expression.

The next chapter, ”Mitigation at work: Functions and lexical realizations”, by
Gabriela Chefneux, focuses on features of intercultural communication such as
evaluation, modality, questions and humour, which are analysed in terms of
functional and linguistic choices of the participants experiencing the process
of mitigation. The results indicate that Romanian participants are more
indirect in their utterances, using more words to react to what they perceive
as face-threatening situations. For instance, hedging devices are used for
three main reasons: 1) politeness (commands and evaluation); 2) downplaying of
professional experience; and 3) accountability, in order to justify the fact
that tasks are not completed. Lexically speaking, the most frequently used
mitigation strategies are indirect speech acts expressing requests, question
tags, clauses of reason and condition, downtoners and adverbs, approximators
and diminishers, as well as words indicating possibility.

One specific area of professional communication is “Moderation techniques in
meeting management”, which is explored by Stanca Măda. She aims at analysing
the role of the chair, from a moderator’s perspective, in workplace meetings.
The author approaches the behaviour of chairs by means of using efficient
communication techniques for facilitating discussions. She has developed three
sets of moderation techniques -- opening, debating and structuring -- all of
which can contribute to a successful moderation style. One of the most
important techniques is the opening one, in which the moderator needs to
create the appropriate climate for discussions in order to gain the
participants’ trust in him/her. Also, the moderator needs to control the
meeting in an organised manner, without intending to monopolise discussions or
to prevent conflicting opinions. And finally, topic management is another duty
a chair must perform during the meeting. “Structuring” refers to the way in
which the chair manages the objectives of the meeting. Măda argues that the
introduction of moderation techniques will increase positive results in all
kinds of teamwork including meetings, conferences, discussions, focus groups,
political committees and decision-making boards.

The last chapter in Part II is Răzvan Săftoiu’s paper on “Small talk -- a work
of frame”, in which the author reviews some theories on interpersonal
communication in order to suggest an integrating definition of small talk. He
starts with three distinct theories -- conversational continuum, identity and
frame -- and emphasizes the idea that small talk is a strategic mini-ritual.
His main findings are that in professional contexts, there are the so-called
‘transitional phatic episodes’ (e.g. McCarthy 2003) when interactants want to
renegotiate their social relationship, which may re-establish the balance of
power between them, and as a result, can settle a dispute or facilitate a
transition to core talk. An example of this would be when a chairperson
accepts the interruption of a speaker and does not interpret it as a sanction.

Part III (“Specific issues in professional communication”) contains two
studies. The first reviews the importance of translation and the advantages of
corpus-based approaches to translation, and the second focuses on the usage of
address forms in Portuguese and Romanian written communication. Oana Tatu and
Mona Arhire’s article (“Translation as a form of intercultural workplace
communication”) aims at shedding light on the interdisciplinary nature of
translation studies, as well as on translators’ tools (i.e. machine
translation, translation memory, terminology databases and dictionaries, and
electronic corpora). The study reveals the advantages of modern research
methodologies related to corpus-based translation studies, which are compared
to traditional approaches in the field. The authors argue that electronic
corpora are indispensable translation tools, as they provide a fast, reliable
and authentic search and documentation method. However, the professional
translator is the ultimate authority, and needs to use judgement, semantic
competence, playfulness, creativity and originality in the translation
process.

The final paper is (“Forms of address in professional communication in
Brazilian Portuguese and Romanian”) by Veronica Manole. Her corpus consists of
two types of data: authentic workplace documents (mainly from private
companies); and templates from two recently published business correspondence
books in Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese. Her findings reveal that in
contemporary language, the address system of each language is undergoing an
overall simplification process. For instance, she argues that although both
Portuguese and Romanian have complex address systems, only a few forms of
address are used in written communication.

EVALUATION

This volume depicts relevant theoretical and practical issues related to
professional communication, which results from the in-depth research conducted
by the contributors. It is a useful resource for scholars and advanced
students who are interested in professional communication across cultures, as
well as for people who need to use English at work to communicate effectively
in a wide range of situations through both written and spoken means.

In their introduction, the editors state that the general aim of the volume is
“to capture changes in professional communication occurring in different parts
of the world: New Zealand, United Kingdom, India and Romania” (2). Considering
the large number of contributions, this general aim has certainly been met. As
with most edited volumes, the contributions are of mixed quality, but overall,
this publication succeeds in summarising and discussing the most prominent
strands of recent and ongoing research on professional communication. Although
the editors admit that the complexity of the phenomena accompanying
professional communication requires different approaches, which most of the
articles solve quite well, the heterogeneity of analytical tools used in some
of the papers does not provide enough background information for the reader in
order for him/her to judge the value of the research presented (e.g. Chapter
7). In addition to this, it should be noted that all contributions require
considerable knowledge of conversation analysis, discourse analysis and corpus
linguistics.

One of the merits of the volume is that the invited authors have analysed
authentic verbal or written interactions in order to show the strategies used
by participants when coding and decoding messages. I would like to highlight
Săftoiu’s well-structured article on small talk (pp. 213-233), where he
includes humour as a means of achieving transitional small talk. He argues
that using jokes to release tension proves to be beneficial in business
encounters and adds that participants must not interfere with the joke
mechanism if they want to turn it into a successful transitional phatic
episode. The combination of small talk and humour in a professional context is
relatively under-researched, and therefore, Săftoiu’s article opens new
avenues for further research. Also, Măda’s contribution offers interesting
suggestions concerning the roles of a moderator in professional contexts. She
shows that by means of various linguistic devices, such as open questions, the
moderator can appear as a respected authority who manages to solicit the
opinion of all participants and to facilitate group decisions.

One specific shortcoming of the volume is the editorial work, which can be
criticized regarding both form and content. Concerning form, the lines in the
abstracts are not justified throughout the book. Also, the volume would have
benefited from better proofreading. For instance, in one abstract (83) the
author mentions “2 types of social interactions”, and in the corresponding
conclusion (103), she refers to three events. Furthermore, in the “Mitigation
at work” article, there are a number of spelling inaccuracies (e.g. “This
paper is part of a more complex study which analysis…”(169)) and other
evidence of a lack of revision (e.g. “Hofstede” being repeated in reference to
only one author (170)).

All in all, the volume “Professional Communication across Languages and
Cultures” succeeds in providing a thorough and welcomed overview of many
emergent issues in the field of cross-cultural professional communication.

REFERENCES

Ervin-Tripp, Susan, Guo, Jiansheng and Lampert, Martin. 1990. “Politeness and
persuasion in children’s control acts”. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 307-331.

McCarthy, Michael. 2003. “Talking back: ‘Small interactional response tokens
in everyday conversation”. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36(1).
33-63.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky is Associate Professor of English Linguistics in the
English Department at Budapest Business School, College of International
Management and Business. Her research interests include discourse analysis,
intercultural communication and English for Specific Purposes. She has
published on business communication, intercultural communication and
politeness issues in business emails.








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